Chocobeastie, I want to correct you on this emphatically, especially since you appear to like to position yourself as a public authority on many matters. If you are so keen on being an authority, then you should perhaps realize that such a position comes with a lot of added responsibility for your actions and statements. Reckless statements like the one you made above actually paint you as a quite clueless and highly irresponsible person.
chocobeastie wrote:Try 150-200mg of DMT, that's how much some first timers need.
That is completely irresponsible advice. Please have a little more respect for other people's well-being and stop saying things like this.
May I remind you that this site has an Attitude page stating under the heading
"1.3 Safe and constructive drug talk":
dmt-nexus Attitude wrote:This forum is not a place for superficial unsafe talk of drugs such as excessive use and dosages, unsafe combinations and settings and careless use of substances that naturally have a riskier profile without due disclaimers and clear signs of having learned from mistakes and offering insights for better usage.
Additionally, the Health and Safety page states under the heading
"8 Where, how and how much to take":
dmt-nexus Healt and Safety wrote:Specially with oral dosing, it is STRONGLY recommended to start with very low dosages (30-50mg DMT) and if its too weak, raise gradually in subsequent sessions, till one finds his own sweet spot.
People who are unfamiliar with oral ingestion of the combination of harmalas and dmt seem to be mostly struggling with properly deactivating the body's maoi enzymes. Recommending a huge dose of dmt, because some people fail to get the maoi deactivation right at first, is risking that the people who do get it right at first will have a traumatizing experience resulting from a dmt overdose.
Rather than increasing the amount of dmt, people should optimize their maoi inhibition strategy by increasing the amount of harmalas. That way there may be some risk of bodily inconvenience in the form of nausea, while minimizing the risk of trainwrecks in the form of freakouts.
My best practical advice is to prepare several doses constituting of 100 mg harmalas in combination with 25 mg of dmt. Take one dose, wait thirty minutes and take another dose of 100 + 25. Optionally, wait thirty minutes and take another dose. If this still is not sufficient, take another one. I expect that not many people will want to take the fourth dose.
When I shared a few of such measured out doses with a few friends, two were completely overwhelmed by only two doses, while the other two were slightly underwhelmed by two doses. What if all four were given three (or more) doses? BTW these were not "first timers", all having partaken in many ayahuasca sessions before their first pharmahuasca experience.
A complication with using extracts is that after the preparatory fasting, the digestive system may have shut down largely, possibly causing the alkaloids to not be taken up properly into the body. When ingesting a traditional ayahuasca brew, the body needs to do a lot of work to process the potion, so the activation of the digestive system happens automatically. With pharmahuasca, many people benefit from eating some toast with butter (or anything else that sufficiently activates the digestive system, but doesn't have a bad interaction with harmalas) right after ingesting the first dose of alkaloids.
In general, with pharmahuasca, people should expect to give it a few tries to figure out what works best for them. The mantra that applies is "start low, work upwards from that", not "dive first, check parachute later."
Pharmahuasca is not more difficult than diy ayahuasca, btw. The latter also has the complication of learning how to do the brewing right. With pharma, at least you know (because you can weight it out exactly) that your potion contains what it should. In contrast, when unfamiliar with the brewing process, and when unsure about the actual potency of the plant material at hand, misfires are much more likely.